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Global Payments Breach Fueled Prepaid Card Fraud

Krebs on Security – (National) Global Payments Breach fueled prepaid card fraud. Debit card accounts stolen in a recent hacker break-in at card processor Global Payments were showing up in fraud incidents at retailers in Las Vegas and elsewhere, according to officials from one bank impacted by the fraud. At the beginning of March, Danbury, Connecticut-based Union Savings Bank (USB) began seeing an unusual pattern of fraud on a dozen or so debit cards it had issued. When the bank determined the facility where the purchases took place was a customer of Global Payments, it contacted Visa to alert the card association of a possible breach, according to USB’s chief risk officer. That is when USB heard from a fraud investigator at Vons, a grocery chain in southern California and Nevada. According to the chief risk officer, the investigator said the fraudsters were coming to the stores to buy low-denomination – 5 – prepaid cards, and then encoding debit card accounts issued by USB onto them. The thieves then used those cards to purchase additional prepaid cards with much higher values. The risk officer said Visa alerted USB that about 1,000 debit accounts it issued were compromised in the Global Payments breach — including the dozen or so card accounts that initially prompted USB to investigate. USB officials said the bank suffered about $75,000 in fraudulent charges, and that it has so far spent close to $10,000 reissuing customer cards.